The Dance
by Raeth Xin
Summary: Hell is repetition, as Rufus discovers. But what does it hold for Tseng? (Warning: rather gory)
1. The Dance

__

Disclaimer: All characters and locations in this story are property of Squaresoft.

Inspiration from the usual place- (see opening quote)

Please read and review- all comments appreciated!

-----------------------------------------

"She's waiting for you in hell. And she's turned cannibal. When you get there, she's going to eat you alive. Over and over and over again. Because that's what hell's about- repetition. I think in our hearts, most of us know that."

(Storm of the Century, Stephen King)

---------------------------------------------

The dance began again.

Rufus stood on the rooftop, trench coat billowing around his ankles. His shotgun was in one hand, Dark Nation beside him, and AVALANCHE in his sights.

He stepped forward to meet them, his face twisting into a smirk. His eyes had already lighted on the body behind the glass, the body skewered to the table by a giant sword. _Sephiroth's_ sword, according to Palmer, and it sure looked like it. 

Rufus turned his eyes back to AVALANCHE, running his eyes across their faces. The smirk was still on his face, and he stood firm. It was a dance, an endless reel played over and over again. The steps were familiar, and couldn't be changed. Maybe it was fate. More likely it was just what he deserved.

"Who are you?" he heard himself say. The words could have been coming out of someone else's mouth, as far as he was concerned. The terrorists were talking, but he didn't hear a word. It didn't matter, he knew every word that was said. He knew it all.

And still the dance went on. "What a crew," he heard himself say. How could his voice be so steady? How could he still be standing? He struggled to scream, but his traitorous body kept him prisoner. It was trapped in the dance, and the dance wasn't done.

Rufus felt himself striding forward, making his speech. How he hated this speech. What he wouldn't give to take back every word and replace it with an endless scream from the depths of his being. It would end this dance, at least. 

He strode past AVALANCHE one by one, delivering his speech without a hitch. Why wouldn't he? He'd had practise, at least. 

Past the ancient. Her eyes fixed on his, and how was it she couldn't see what was in his eyes? But maybe she could. Her expression changed slightly, but before he could study it, his feet had moved on. 

Past the leader of this stupid crew. Rufus couldn't quite remember if his shoes had been brown or black, and so they flickered between the two at the edge of his vision. It made his head ache. 

Looked up into the huge man's empty eyes. Saw his own face reflected in them. His mouth was smiling as he talked, but his eyes were screaming. 

Rufus strode back to stage center, finishing off his speech. 

"…there's no need to waste money on them," he said mockingly. Not a quiver. 

The others were leaving, and only the ex-Soldier was left. Strife, that was his name. Rufus turned to face him, lifting his shoulders in a shrug. 

"Why do you want to fight me?" he asked. His eyes seemed to widen as the pressure increased inside his head. He screamed again inwardly as pain lanced up his arms. But it would be worse next time, no doubt about that. 

_Please kill me Strife,_ he thought with all his strength. _Just break the dance and kill me, don't let me get away! _

Strife had finished talking and was ready to fight. So was Rufus. He willed his arm to stay put, for Strife's first blow to land and end this nightmare. But his hand came up, and his finger pulled the trigger as his feet dodged him aside. 

The dance went on. Rufus shot, and watched Dark Nation cast his spells. He tried with all his force to not move, but no matter how hard he willed himself to just get hit, his body would disobey. 

_Look into my eyes Strife,_ he screamed. _Just look and see what's really going on!_

But Strife was watching Dark Nation. It was no good. Rufus felt his arms reload and take aim, and felt waves of agony push him under. No matter how much it hurt now, he would rather stay out here forever than have to get into the chopper again. And there it was again, the sound of it's hungry blades growing closer and the fight nearing its end.

_Come on Strife, just kill me! Kill me! For once just get it right and KILL ME!_

But he was too slow. Rufus stepped back and grabbed onto the landing skid of the chopper. It seemed he could hear it snarling in triumph. 

It was now he concentrated every shred of his will, every part of his being. _Let go,_ he willed his fingers desperately. _Please, just let go and let me die._

His fingers held firm. Rufus screamed in his head again, as much in frustration and hopelessness as in agony. His head ached miserably from not being able to scream out loud. He thought that pretty soon he would either explode or go insane. 

At least he hoped it would be soon. 

Rufus climbed into the chopper, and felt the darkness envelop him. He tried to close his eyes, and couldn't. And in the middle of this clinging darkness, it was there again. 

Eyes. And teeth. Rufus felt the teeth fix onto his arm, tearing off another chunk of flesh. Still, he couldn't scream. Couldn't speak, or even move. The teeth dug in again, and in the silent blackness Rufus could hear it chewing. Swallowing. Moving in for another bite. 

His mind was cracking under the weight of his silent screams. But he didn't think it would break anytime soon. 

He was too tough for his own good, it seemed.

Heat, and incredible pain. He felt the gaping holes in his arms stop bleeding. His trench coat must be mending itself as well, Rufusnever saw any tears. 

The eyes disappeared. The dance was ready to be performed again, he thought wearily. The chopper swooped, and Rufus was thrown back into the world of light. He was standing on the rooftop. AVALANCHE was before him. Behind him, in the chopper, eternity was waiting. It was hungry, and it would never be full. The dance would repeat itself, possibly until it was finished eating him. And then what? 

Rufus had a terrible thought. Maybe then, it would start all over again. Maybe his flesh would grow back so the thing in the chopper could start from the beginning. 

Rufus felt his sanity bend. But it wouldn't break, it wasn't allowed. 

He was still trying to scream as he opened his mouth.

"Who are you?" he said. 

And the dance began again.

__

---------------------------------

And the weirdness continues. Should I do other characters as well? Interesting to see what other dead characters see in their version of hell, eh? Well, let me know one way or another.

-RX-


	2. The Dance part 2

__

Disclaimer: Characters, locations, anything FF7 are property of Squaresoft. 

AN: This one's pretty gory. So be warned. 

----------------------------------------------------------

"This inhuman place make human monsters."

(The Shining, Stephen King)

---------------------------------------------------------

Something was wrong. 

Tseng couldn't pinpoint it at first, but it started with a feeling. A very bad feeling. 

"Sir?" he asked. President Rufus didn't answer. It was getting dark outside, and for some reason the lights were off in here. Tseng's nerves were screaming now with the bad vibrations. Something was _definitely _wrong.

"I'm here to make my report," he tried again. Still, no answer. Tseng noticed that Rufus wasn't even looking at him. His head was lowered, his hair obscuring his face. 

"I…" he stopped. The room seemed to get darker. What _was_ his report? Why couldn't he remember? 

"Tseng," Rufus said slowly. He didn't look up.

"Yes sir?" Still with a bad feeling. He felt like he was underwater in all this darkness. 

Rufus lifted his head slightly, fixing his blue eyes on Tseng's dark ones. And as he did, the feeling that something was wrong changed to a certainty. Rufus' eyes were two dark holes into nothingness. They still looked like eyes, but that didn't fool Tseng in the slightest. They were bottomless wells of nothingness, and utter emptiness. But there was something else in those eyes, something bordering that vacuity. After a few moments of staring, Tseng thought it might be pain. 

Tseng backed away slowly, unable to speak or lift his eyes from that horrible gaze. 

Rufus cleared his throat and straightened up in his chair. Tseng noticed that the arms of his suit were soaked crimson with blood. 

"This place…" Rufus trailed off, his eyes going from Tseng's into the empty darkness outside the windows. Then back again. Yes, there was definitely pain in those eyes. Tseng had been so fixed on the nothingness that he'd missed it entirely. But he was _drowning _in it. 

Rufus lifted his right arm above the table, holding it out so Tseng could see. Or maybe he was trying to point at something. 

"This inhuman place makes human monsters," Rufus said finally. His arm was soaked in blood from shoulder to elbow, beyond that was a mass of shredded material and strips of dangling flesh. Most of it was gone, and Tseng noticed with growing horror that the shredded flesh and cracked bones bore teeth marks. Three of Rufus' fingers were gone. 

Tseng looked up from this horror back into Rufus' eyes. They were steady, but underneath them he could see the agony running through.

"Rufus…" he began. He couldn't say anything more, it seemed. In the centre of his head, a shrill whine began to grow. Tseng reckoned that it must be the sound of his mind cracking. He didn't realise he was backing away until he hit the doors with his back, and then stopped. Rufus was still looking at him, mangled arm upraised. Faintly, Tseng thought he could hear a chopper approaching. And he couldn't move. 

The whine in his head grew louder. Rufus sat silent like a broken robot before him. Tseng felt his sanity start to slip away. This all felt like a dream. 

"This inhuman place," Rufus said again. Tseng barely heard him over the sound in his head. "-makes human monsters."

Then he realised what the sound in his head was. Rufus was screaming in his mind. 

Tseng doubled over, as if he'd been hit. Still Rufus' screams resounded in his head, the sounds of pure hopelessness and utter agony. 

The chopper was growing closer.

And it was getting darker outside.

Tseng felt his sanity take another slide. How was he supposed to stay sane with that awful sound in his head? And before him sat Rufus, and Tseng was pretty sure that even if he was in there somewhere, he wasn't pulling the strings. And that screaming!

The door was bloody. 

Tseng jerked forward and wheeled to look at it, eyes bulging. The door was soaked in blood, which was still fresh. He looked around at Rufus, still with an arm up, and realised that Rufus was covered in blood too. So was his desk, his chair, the floor, the walls. Blood covered _everything_. 

Tseng was suddenly glad that he could only see the damage to Rufus' arm. 

"This inhuman place makes us monsters, Tseng," Rufus said. Those words entwined in his head with the screams. And the chopper was almost here. 

The screams in his head changed suddenly. Now it was pain, and fear. Total, utter fear. 

Tseng looked out the window, and almost screamed himself. Outside was gone, engulfed by a wave of approaching dark. It was almost on the balcony now, and the sound of the chopper was very, very close. 

Then it was on the balcony, and the sound of the chopper changed. It began to sound almost like words, and none of them were good. 

And it sounded hungry. 

Tseng looked at Rufus, back out the window to where that terrible darkness had landed, and this time he did scream. He turned and started beating at the door, trying to get out. He had to get out, because that awful alien darkness was going to come in.

His frantic eyes fell on the knob. He had to turn it, of course. 

"This inhuman place," Rufus was saying over and over again even while he screamed in Tseng's mind. "This inhuman, evil place."

Tseng finally managed to open the door and stumble out. He slammed the door behind him even as the hungry darkness got out of the chopper. 

And behind the door, Rufus began to scream out loud. 

Tseng ran. 

******

Slowly, Tseng managed to regain control of himself. His lungs burned and his legs felt rubbery. How far had he run?

He glanced up and saw that he was in Hojo's lab. But it was empty. 

_At least the lights are on in here,_ he thought, and shuddered. He would not think about Rufus's office. That train of thought was going to be banned unless he wanted to go insane. 

But where was everyone? Tseng slowly walked across the lab, looking for signs of life. There was nothing. And it was silent, deathly silent. 

The bad feeling began to return. 

He had reached the service elevator that took people up to the second floor of the lab. And through the shaft, he could hear faint noises.

__

Don't go up there, he thought, but he'd already gotten on and pressed the button. Some deeper feeling was telling him that he had to go see, even if it was a bad idea. 

The sound got louder as he reached the upper floor, but he still couldn't tell what it was. He could see where it was coming from, though. A group of figures were gathered around the specimen elevator, looking at something trapped inside. As Tseng got closer, he recognised the suits. 

__

Reno and Rude, he thought, feeling himself go limp with relief. _I've got to tell them… something's wrong with the President…_

The sound got louder, and Tseng stopped suddenly, only a few feet away. The broad backs of the Turks (and Hojo, who he hadn't noticed initially) blocked his view into the elevator, but he could hear well enough. 

__

Forget the President, his mind suddenly yelled. _There's something wrong with them, and if you get any closer, there'll be something wrong with you._

Just as Tseng made up his mind to run, they turned around. 

"Boss," Reno said calmly. "About time you showed up." He twirled his nightstick casually and took a step towards Tseng. 

"We've got everything under control," Rude added. But Tseng didn't hear either of them. His eyes were looking past them, fixed with horror on what they had been looking at. 

It was Aeris. Or had been Aeris, when the other half of her face had been there. 

"…" he couldn't speak. Horror and despair welled up in him. His legs gave out and he fell to his knees, still staring mutely at her. 

Then Aeris opened her mouth and screamed again. 

"Damn Rude, I thought you said she was done!" Reno laughed. Rude chuckled and shook his head. Tseng didn't hear either of them, he was screaming as well, screaming and trying to get to Aeris, who was somehow still alive. Still alive even though he could see her cracked skull gleaming through in several places, and half her teeth were showing through a hole in her cheek. And she was screaming.

Tseng reached out for her, but was grabbed and pulled away. He looked up into the expressionless black glass of Rude's sunglasses as he was dragged away. "Why?" he croaked. "Why would you do this?"

There was a thump, a sizzling noise, and a smell of burnt flesh. Aeris' screams tapered off and Reno stepped back from her, lowering his nightstick. "There we go boss, all done," he said, still in that cheery tone of voice. He turned to look at Tseng, and his green eyes were not human at all. "Did you give Rufus your report?"

Tseng struggled in Rude's grip, making faint moaning noises as he tried to get away from those terrible eyes, those monster's eyes. Hojo hadn't moved throughout the whole episode, and Tseng could see why perfectly, it was a little hard to move or talk when you'd been skewered on a metal spike and had rats gnawing on you. Thank god Hojo's back was turned.

Rude let go of him, and Tseng crawled away, trying to get to his feet. Reno's footsteps sounded very loud in the silence. He was closing the distance, and any moment now Tseng would be grabbed and have to look into those inhuman monster eyes. They were the eyes of whatever dark force had invaded the President's office, the eyes of nothingness and forever. And those eyes were wearing Reno, and to a lesser extent Rude, because they weren't really here. 

That thought got Tseng on his feet, and he began to run again. He ran faster and harder than he'd ever run in his life, and all the time Aeris' screams drilled into his head like a silver spike. So he ran. 

And after awhile, Tseng began to realise that in this building, there was nowhere left to run. 

The elevators didn't go down to the ground floor. The stairs below the 60th floor were flooded by the same creeping hungry darkness as on the 70th floor office. Tseng ran back and forth, feeling his mind letting go a little more with each step. He was already in the grip of pure panic, and he couldn't stop running. But there was nowhere left to run, and soon his exhausted body would realise that. 

He stopped outside the mayor's office, panting for breath. He was sure he couldn't move another step, and that the darkness would soon catch up to him. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, because somehow the darkness was this building, this cold, powerful place had become alive, and it had trapped them all in its nightmare. It made sense to Tseng that it would be the Shinra building, of all places. This place had always been evil, and now it had come alive. And they were almost all here, the faces of Shinra that had killed and murdered and stolen and rolled in their greed in these rooms. He'd seen them all as he ran from room to room, and they were all the same. Doomed. 

President Shinra, hanging disembowelled but still alive, in the conference room.

Heidegger, his body engulfed by hungry green and yellow flames, trapped in his office chair. 

Scarlet, her feet and hands cut off, trying to crawl away from an army of her robotic contraptions.

Palmer, being crushed slowly beneath the model of Midgar in the map room.

They were all here. Their evil had brought the building to life, and now it was destroying them. 

And were those footsteps approaching? Tseng thought they were. It would look like Reno, but its green eyes would be holes into hell, and whatever was beneath its skin had never been human. It was the Shinra building, and the rooms of ruin and the halls of the dead had come to life to torture their occupants for eternity. 

Reno came around the corner, grin firmly in place, green eyes twinkling. Instead of his nightstick he now had Rufus' shotgun, but he wouldn't be needing it. Tseng was incapable of even moving. 

"Found you at last, boss! Have to say you put on quite a chase." He stopped beside Tseng's slumped form, looking down on him with those dead eyes. "But it's time for you to get a room, boss, you know?"

Tseng did know. He'd seen those room sand what they had to offer. But he had to ask a question.

"Why Aeris?" he croaked. "Why her? She's not Shinra, you shouldn't have her. So why is she here?"

The smile dropped for a minute, and it regarded him carefully through its green eyes. "You're right, boss, we usually only do Shinra here. But we take what we can get, and as much as we can get, and how could we pass up such a pretty little thing?"

"You're a monster," Tseng whispered. The Reno-thing laughed, a grating sound that made him wince. 

"Not me, boss. Not quite, anyway. You're the monsters, and all I do is run your building." It nodded to itself, then dropped to a crouch beside Tseng. He could smell its breath, and it smelled like ancient dust. "Yep, it's a tough job, but it's got its perks." It smiled, and between its teeth Tseng could see the darkness, that perfect, solid blackness that was waiting its chance. 

"Time to go Tseng," it said. 

It's mouth opened.

-----------------------------------------

__

AN: Well, it's gonna be pretty hard to top this, I think, so unless I get any really good ideas, this is probably where the dance ends…

Please leave a review!

-RX-


End file.
